In the recent years, with the pervasiveness of computers and a great variety of electronic devices connected to the Internet, Digital Humanities (DH) as a research field has experienced a great transformation that has permitted the completion of very ambitious projects with large impact in the society beyond the academia. This has resulted in a major economic impact in the cultural and creative industry. A number of new and powerful ICT have made possible the exploitation of a wealth of data (either digitized or digitally born) that have, on the other hand, changed enormously the practice in DH, and exposed novel challenges that must be faced in order to complete any of the said projects. From the creation to the consumption of digital resources, there are new stakeholders, contexts and tasks to consider. The amount of digital resources produced (or digitized), stored, explored, and analysed in any DH project is immensely vast (specially if we take into account the introduction of linked-data), so the traditional humanities tools have to be either substituted or aided with ancillary tools in the form of interactive visualisations or novel user interfaces. Furthermore, during the whole lifecycle of any DH project –from the data preparation to the actual analysis or exploration phase–, many decisions have to be made in order to yield the desired results that depend on the uncertainty pertaining to both the datasets and the models behind them.
The PROVIDEDH project (PROgressive VIsual DEcision-Making in Digital Humanities) aims to provide visual interactive tools that convey the degree of uncertainty of the datasets and computational models used behind, designed to progressively adapt the visualizations to incorporate the new, more complete or more accurate data. The project would not take only into account scholars, since it is most relevant in DH the fact that the role of citizens has changed enormously. We live in a society that has democratized science, and the number of projects in which the contribution of citizens, either producing or using digital resources, has exploded. The experience gained in other areas of science in which the intervention of computing has been much deeper and constant will be analysed and adapted to the case of humanities. Specially, regarding infrastructures, frameworks, models and tools that can be standardized for the different disciplines in the humanities.
For more information see the project website.